a closer look at in the romney's recent poll surge and the obama's campaign response. will the liar-liar strategy work. and congressional hearings in libya shed new light on what happened before, after and during the attack in benghazi and raises new questions put administration's response. welcome to the journal editorial

report. all eyes were on kentucky thursday height when vice president joe biden and paul ryan squared off on everything from reform to eye ran to middle class taxes. >> the middle class got knocked on their heels, the great recession crushed them, they need some help now. the last people who need help are 120,000 families for another, another $500 billion tax cut over the next ten years. >> there aren't enough rich people in small businesses to tax to pay for all their spending. and so the next time you hear them say don't worry about it, we will get a few wealthy people to pay their fair share, watchout, middle class, the tax bill is coming to you. >> joining the panel this week, wall street journal columnist and deputy editor, dan, and jason riley.

>> he did energize the base. after last week's debate performance by obama, democrats were concerned. they were worried. i think they were less so after this vice presidential debate, and i think that was joe biden's primary concern, energizing the party again. >> how did he specifically do that. >> he mention add lot of things that people wanted or democrats had wanted. the president mentioned last week mentioned the 47% remark and auto bailout, and that's what they wanted to hear and he served up a lot of red meat last night. >> how about paul ryan hold up? >> his job was to go in there, meet all these accusations, and everyone knew what was coming. this was going to be joe biden just lambasting him right and left. so his job was to go out there, meet this for the obama campaign

strategy, refute it, call them out on it, and generally not put in any big errors that would in any way dominate the discussion in the days after. and to that extent he did do that. >> one of the features of this debate was the biden mannerisms and his behavior. biden-interruptous you might call it. let's look at it. >> here's the problem. they got caught with their hands in the cookie jar turning medicare into a piggy bank for obamacare. their own act tear from the administration came to congress and said one of out of six hospitals and nursing homes are going to go out of business as a result of this. >> that's not what they said. >> 7.4 million seasoners are projected to lose the current medicare advantage they have, that's a $3,200 benefit cut. >> that didn't happen. more people signed up. >> these are from -- >> more people signed up for medicare advantage after the change. >> but there's nobody --

>> mr. vice president. >> no. >> mr. vice president i know you are under a lot of duress to make up for lost ground. [laughter] >> but i think people are better served if we don't keep interrupting each other. >> dan, by one count 83 times biden interrupted? how effective was that as a strategy? >> i think it was totally in effective. at that point there miff been about 25 interruptions. and let me just, somebody counted, there were 83 interruptions in a 90 minute speech and joe biden probably spoke three quarters of the time which means he effective destroyed every statement that paul ryan tried to make. and, you no i, biden came across as a bar room bore, but at least there you can say thanks, i've got to go home. he made millions of people listen to him for 90 minutes. >> all right, bill. but was ryan too differential given that onslaught? some think he should have been more assertive. >> i think he was too

differential. i think he let joe biden have the last word on too many things and so farther. that said, i think he did what he was there to do, which was to show he was a vice presidential candidate, that he had a good demeanor, a good argument. no one is going to remember anything bad about what he did. joe biden dominated the debate. you can say he won, but it might be also that he lost the debate, especially once we see the saturday night live portray alf this. >> you mean he might have won in terms of -- >> well, he read the debate but he lost it, if you look at his smirk, snarl -- >> a former colleague said one of the measures of a debate is who cuts the ad after the debate. the rnc has this ad of laughter. i think it's very effective. and i think in the post debate, what are people going to remember? they aren't going to remember the fine points, they are going to remember joe biden's mannerisms.

michael goodwin in the post said he was laughing in the beginning and angry at the end, it wasn't clear whether his medication was wearing off or kicking in. >> if you like joe biden you are happy with that performance f you didn't like joe biden, you thought he was a bore last night. but what about the people in the middle? what about the undecides? >> what do you think? >> i think it wasn't just the interruptions but the con descending manner that turned off some of those undecided voters and that may come back to hundred the ticket later on. >> kim, do you think paul ryan looked presidential? rose to the presidential level on foreign policy? >> he did. look, that was a bit of a mixed performance at times. you know, he scored very heavily talking about libya and benghazi at the beginning, talking about american projectioning it's image in the world, some of the focus groups afterwards showed some people thought that was his most effective lines of the entire debate. i think there was less of a good response on some issues, syria and iran to a certain degree. although the question is again

whether or not biden's performance was just so over the top that did any of that really matter? because people were having a hard time paying attention to anything about joe biden. >> dan, paul, this was supposed to be a debate. it's called a debate. it was not supposed to be a wwf smackdown. i think most people came to it tuned in because they wanted to hear the vice president of the united states and his opponent talk about the issues that are before the american peel right now, primarily being the economy. th were not given the opportunity to do that. and the reason they weren't is because of the way joe biden behaved during the debate. i think he's going to cost the obama campaign long-term among undecided voters. >> any obligation here, bill, on the part of the moderator? i hate to pick on the moderator but you are supsed to make sure people can at least hear when they say. >> i don't think she's biased, i think some people say that, but i much prefer the first format because i found disconcerting

part what dan said, but partly they were debating with martha raddatz, one person, rather than debating with one another and the american people. if you look at the split screens, they weren't looking at each other. i would rather the issues to be debated be decided less by one newspaper person or one tv reporter than by the candidates themselves. >> it's not a press conference, it's a debate. >> right. much more on this week's vice presidential debate when we come back. plus a look ahead to tuesday's obama-romney rematch. expectations are hay for both candidates. so will the president raise his game and can mitt romney sustain his momentum? ♪

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we are back with more on deet baits.

let's look at a clip from the economy. >> they talk about the great recession like it fell out of the sky like, oh, my goodness, where did it come from? it came from this man vote to go put two wars on the credit card and at the same time put a redescription drug benefit on the credit card. a trillion dollar tax cut for the very wealthy. i was there, i voted against them. i said, no, we can't afford that. now all of a sudden these guys are so concerned about the debt that they created. >> congressman? >> joe and i are from similar towns. he's from strain ton, pennsylvania and i'm from janesville, wisconsin. dewpoint hot unemployment rate was in strain ton today? >> sure do. >> do you know what it was when you came. >> did biden turn the tables and put the focus more on romney's agenda? >> paul ryan didn't get much of a chance to put the onus on

biden for anything. look, i think he it go out there. he tried to the extent that he could while he was dodging the kitchen sinks that were coming at him to put some information out there, continue to further the romney agenda, the sort of positive vision for the economy you but he didn't get a big chance. that's something mitt romney is going to have to be aware of and get ready for as he moves into this debate with owe -- obama. obama won't go on the stage and make the style mistakes joe biden did. >> the answer for ripe i thought was week. he said romney is a car guy. what does that mean? that's not an answer on the bailout. that's not an explanation. that's one of those nonsense. >> i think on domestic policy i think ryan did okay. most of the debate was foreign policy which plays to biden's strength. but on domestic policy i thought ryan did okay except for the

discussion of entitle meant reform where i think biden said who do you trust, talk to the cameras, and i thought that came off well for biden. i think he was a little defensive, ryan was in defending his budget proposals from the past and we got distracted from that. on whole on domestic policy i should ryan had a good night. >> will this have an impact on the presidential race, dan, or are we going to forget about this except for the saturday night clips on joe biden's antics? >> i think it will have an affect on the race. voters are paying close attention to what these people are saying in terms of why is the economy behaving as poorly as it is. if you think, connect this to what barack obama himself has been doing out there, in his stump speech he primarily mocks and ridicule mitt romney rather than talking about his own record. and biden's weird performance

was kind of a piece of that technique that they have adopted. i think voters are looking for something deeper from the president now. the burden is on him to show it next week. >> no hint of a second term agenda in biden's -- >> no, not at all. i think he showed president obama that you can be aggressive, you can defend. >> so romney ought to be on notice, he's coming at you? >> right. >> but he also showed us how not to be aggressive at the same time. and one of the dangers is, i got the impression from the last presidential debate that romney was holding back a little bit. that he was really -- >> really? >> that he was a little nice, he left a few zingers on the table because he was dominating. >> but obama is such a cooler customer than biden. biden is all heat and energy and attack. obama is laid-back. i mean, can he really go on the attack like biden? >> i think he can, but i think the danger is he opens the door for romney to be more aggressive in his responses, and i think gov. romney will be more

aggressive. >> he will have to be more aggressive than paul ryan. >> yeah. >> two things. i think you will see obama being more aggressive but without the smirking and without -- >> and more dangerous potentially. >> and with the difficulty of the next debate. when ordinary people are asking the question, it's hard to do that and turn to your opponent and attack. >> one of the problems the obama campaign has had had is before denver they were careful not to have the president be aggressive in his attacks because it would have a knock on his numbers. you see that now. there's a lot of independent who are still interested in voting for him because he likes him. if he's very mean and nasty the way biden was this week, that could hurt him more, especially among sub groups like women. >> when we come back, the congressional hearing on libya seeds new light on what happened before and during and after the attack and raises new questions about the administration's response.

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>> given the information that you saw on tv and your knowledge of the situation in libya, did you come to a conclusion as to whether this was a terrorist actor weather it was based on some film that was on the internet in ltd. col. wood. >> it was instantly recognizable to me as a trust attack. >> instantly recognizable? >> yes, sir. >> why is that? >> mainly because of my prior knowledge there. i almost expected the attack to

come. >> powerful. and potentially damaging testimony this week from ltd. col. andrew wood who commanded a team there prior to the assault. the house government reform and oversight committee held a hearing into that attack, which killed four americans, including u.s. ambassador to libya, christine. we are back with brett stevens and he had core natural board member matt kominski. matt, you followed the hearings this week. what did we learn that we didn't know? >> i think three things principally. first of all, we learned there was no protest at the benghazi consulate. >> nonat all? >> no. and others knew this much earlier than the administration. second, they definitely thought it was a terrorist attack earlier than they made clear. the third thing we learned,

repeated requests to boost security he libyan mission were turn down and an elite force led by ltd. col. wood of 16 men was pulled out in august. >> pulled out? >> and extended into the fall. >> we have a clip at the debate because benghazi was a big topic at the vice presidential debate. let's listen. >> our ambassador in paris has a marine attachment guarding him. shouldn't we have a marines guarding our ambassador in benghazi, a place we any there was an al-qaeda cell with arms? >> well we weren't toll they wanted more security and we did not know they wanted more security. by the way, at the time we were told exactly, we said exactly what the intelligence community told us that they knew. that was the assessment. and as the intelligence community change the their view, we made it clear they changed their view. >> blame it on the intelligence community. how is that going to play? >> well, maybe it will play well

if the republicans allow them to get away with that. we've been saying consistently and we've been talking about libya for a long time on this show, this was a failure of policy. it wasn't a feel lure of intelligence. in fact, intelligence, as matt just pointed out, it was all there. we knew what was happening in benghazi. we knew very quickly what kind of incident we faced. we had been tracking al-qaeda in north africa. this was in attention by the administration and a later effort to spin it in a way that was political convenient by blaming the video instead of the rise of extremism there. >> and throwing the intelligence community over the side is politically a pretty risky strategy in the past for political leaders. >> i would, but i would say it's a piece with the obama-biden strategy. he said right there we didn't know. by we he means the vice president and the president. it's of a piece, paul, what they said about the recession and the

economy. obama said the economy wasn't my fault, george bush did it. and now joe biden is saying we didn't know, the intelligence community didn't tell us. they have this instinct not to take responsibility at all for any serious event. >> there were requests put in to the state for more security because they were very worried things were getting to the of control in libya this year. >> does that mean there's a fisher here between secretary of state clinton's state department and their narrative and the administration and the political campaign's narrative which wants to say it was the intelligence community or we didn't get the right story? >> well, patrick kennedy, the other state official who testified, said that he had gotten the same briefing and that he said the same thing they were saying. but the night before this hearing, state win out there and put out a very different story an the administration had pedaled in the first week. >> right. but the benghazi story is a piece of the administration's larger strategy, which is so long as we have an election on,

the rest of the world may as well not exist. iran doesn't exist, syria doesn't exist, the syria rebuffs from russia don't exist and a terrorist attack in benghazi sure as heck doesn't exist until it becomes a problem for us. >> where is secretary of state clinton in this? she's out of the picture. >> look for the next job or keeping a low profile. they put out susan rice, who is a leading candidate for that job if obama wins a second term. >> u.s. ambassador? >> she went on the talk shows after the attack to try to explain what happened, it was the fault of the video and spontaneous demonstrations. >> we will learn a lot more about what happened in benghazi. this issue isn't going away. what about the debate in general on foreign policy, dan? who got the better of that in your view, ryan or biden? >> perhaps joe biden did merely

because he would not allow paul ryan to explain himself fully. but the interesting thing is when they got on to something like afghanistan, if you listen closely, basically what joe biden was saying was that our intention was to get out. both of iraq and of afghanistan. and he was not going to let anything stand in the way of that argument. >> doesn't that resonate with the american mood right now which is lets not undertake any morph these adventures? >> i thought there was such a missed opportunity for polaron on afghanistan, on syria, in part because the romney campaign hasn't really articulated a truly distinctive position. it hasn't been willing to take a risk. paul ryan would have been in a much better position if he said i believe we should impose a no fly zone on syria just as we did in bosnia without the risk of a single calm. and the other thing he should have pressed is yes, we want to get out, but we also want to win. we don't want to squander the sacrifice of 2000 american soldiers who have been there for

twelve years so that the taliban can pick up where they were in 2001. >> that's a good point but the other one on syria, that's not where the romney campaign policy is so it was tough for ryan to be able to go there, as much as i agree with you. coming up in the second half hour, a closer look at mitt romney's post debate bounce. he's taking the lead in some national polls and is closing the gap in some important swing states. how big is the surge? and can romney keep it going? plus, there's no doubt the obama campaign is feeling the heat. but could their new attack strategy backfire? the market has changed, tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 and your plans probably have too. tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 at charles schwab, we'll give you personalized recommendations tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 on how to reinvest that old 401(k). tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 so talk to chuck tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 and bring your old 401(k) tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 into the 21st century. tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 rollover your old 401(k) tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 to a schwab ira tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 and you can receive up to $600. tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 see schwab.com

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